"What matter your foolish reply! O, man, standing lone and bowed earthward, "Your task is a day near its close. Give thanks to the night-giving God." * * * * * Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend with the savage; The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth only above them. A head's breadth? Ay, but therein is hell's depth, and the height up to heaven, And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots, purples, and splendors. AN OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS O, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all! The heaped up sods upon the fire, The pile of turf against the wall! To have a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delph, Speckled and white and blue and brown! I could be busy all the day Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor, And fixing on their shelf again My white and blue and speckled store! I could be quiet there at night Beside the fire and by myself, Sure of a bed and loth to leave The ticking clock and the shining delph! Och! but I'm weary of mist and dark, And roads where there's never a house nor bush, And tired I am of bog and road, And the crying wind and the lonesome hush! And I am praying to God on high, And I am praying Him night and day, For a little house--a house of my own-- Out of the wind's and the rain's way. _Joseph Campbell_ (_Seosamh MacCathmhaoil_) Joseph Campbell was born in Belfast in 1881, and is not only a poet but an artist; he made all the illustrations for _The Rushlight_ (1906), a volume of his own poems. Writing under the Gaelic form of his name, he has published half a dozen books of verse, the most striking of which is _The Mountainy Singer_, first published in Dublin in 1909. I AM THE MOUNTAINY SINGER I am the mountainy singer-- The voice of the peasant's dream, The cry of the wind on the wooded hill, The leap of the fish in the stream. Quiet and love I sing-- The carn on the mountain crest, The _cailin_ in her lover's arms, The child at its mother's breast. Beauty and peace I sing-- The fire on the open hearth, The _cailleach_ spinning at her wheel, The plough in the broken earth. Travail and pain I sing-- The bride on the childing bed, The dark man laboring at his rhymes, The eye in the lambing shed. Sorrow and death I sing-- The canker come on the corn, The fisher lost in the mountain loch, The cry at the mouth of morn. No other life I sing, For I am sprung of the stock That broke the hilly land for bread, And built the nest in the rock! THE OLD WOMAN As a white candle In a holy place, So is the beauty Of an aged face.